The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2)

by Vin Suprynowicz

  “Sure, OK. But which ones? I got thousands.”

  “Where do you take them?”

  “Right in my back yard, mostly.”

  “In fact, could we come over and join you, watch you take some orb photos?”

  “You’re serious.”

  “Very.”

  “When?” Marquita asked.

  “Right now.”

  And then, finally, Marquita laughed. Charming laugh. She was pretty when she let herself be.

  “They don’t come now. Right after sunset is best, before it gets full dark.”

  “This evening, then?”

  Marquita hung her head again. “Sure. OK.”

  “What’s the matter, Marquita?” Chantal asked.

  “The place isn’t cleaned up for company. And I’m afraid you’ll have to eat macaroni and cheese.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Matthew smiled. “If we invite ourselves over, we bring the food. Hot oven grinders and a pizza OK? What kind do you like? And do we bring wine or beer or soda?”

  “Really? You sure?”

  She gave her home address, a modest working-class neighborhood on the far side of the hill, and they agreed on a time, a good half-hour before sunset.

  * * *

  “Les?” Matthew found their local Lovecraft expert replacing polyester dust jacket protectors on books which the customers had jammed into the shelves without properly folding the jacket flaps back under the boards, making portions of the jacket and Mylar protector alike resemble wadded-up packing material. No one was quite sure why or even how they did it; speculation ran to a race of trolls who appeared human only during daylight hours, who had never actually seen a book before and thus regarded them as some kind of threatening object to be battered and subdued.

  “Hm?”

  “The Derlethians.”

  “What about them?”

  “Marquita says Bucky is missing, and some little white guy with him, who she says was ‘one of those Derlethians.’ Says she and Bucky figure Worthy went much too easy on them. On the Derlethians. Mean anything to you?”

  “You mean you don’t know about the biggest apostasy in the Church of Cthulhu, the Derlethian Heresy?”

  “Anything like the Presbyterian schism of 1837?”

  “Out of my area. Though we could sure use another president like Martin Van Buren.”

  “Fill me in.”

  “They called him the Silver Fox of Kinderhook. His term was essentially seen as a continuation of the Jackson regime. Unfortunately, that meant continuing the Indian removals, as well.”

  “Les. The Derlethians.”

  “Ah. OK. The Church of Cthulhu was founded by a smiling, good-looking, curly-haired blond lunatic — prophet, if you prefer — named Aaron Scheckler, based on a series of visions he had under the influence of LSD and mescaline sulfate from 1969 to 1971 while living in a series of yurts and geodesic domes out in the woods in Ashford, Connecticut and later in West Greenwich, Rhode Island, while in the 30-year pursuit of a doctorate in comparative literature on the works of Arthur Machen, Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, and Eric Rucker Eddison. Right?”

  “Right. Knew that. Although I don’t know what Eddison’s doing in there. Eddison’s work is horrible in a different way.”

  “Agreed. I suspect a long string of faculty advisors probably urged Scheckler to tighten up his focus, but Scheckler was reportedly a man longer on enthusiasm than discipline. Before he died, just to add dignity and grandeur to the whole enterprise, Scheckler had his name legally changed to ‘R.U. Nuts.’”

  “Heard that. The church eventually published his incomplete thesis,” Matthew remembered.

  “As The Road to Cthulhu, correct. Interminable, often brilliant, quite mad. I imagine firsts can be pricey.”

  “They sure can. The Derlethians?”

  “The basic doctrine of the church, of course, is that Lovecraft’s writings form the sacred canon, that he was channeling actual prehistoric information about the elder gods, which can be re-accessed by the faithful through the use of the sacred sacraments, which are basically anything Scheckler ever wolfed down.”

  “Right. Even though Lovecraft didn’t so much as drink beer.”

  “Didn’t need to. He had the direct channel from the stars, see. It all flowed to him in a dream state. I should be so lucky. We lesser beings need more help to open the portals, see. But the point is, if the sacred writings are everything Lovecraft ever wrote, who would be the biggest traitor to the cause, the Benedict Arnold of Cthulhianism?”

  “Ah. Wisconsin’s favorite son, August Derleth.”

  “Exactly. Before the fall, Derleth started out as a good guy, co-founding Arkham House to gather together Lovecraft’s stories and publish them in book form. Lovecraft actually knew Derleth, admired some of his writings. The Solar Pons stories are pretty good, although they come later. But when the popularity of Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard skyrocketed in the ’60s, there was a shortage of material to meet the demand, since both those guys died young after publishing a limited amount of stuff, mostly in the pulps. To fill the gap, L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter finished some Conan stories that Howard had left incomplete, and rewrote others that originally had different heroes to turn them into Conan stories.”

  “Right.”

  “Bad enough. But they were pikers compared to Derleth, who probably wrote more words of Lovecraft than Lovecraft ever wrote. The guy churned out prose like a Veg-O-Matic. He’d get hold of an outline Lovecraft never used, or just a sentence or two, a stillborn story idea in the commonplace book or in some letter, he’d expand it into a novella or a full-fledged novel, and publish the thing as ‘by H.P Lovecraft and August Derleth.’ Lots of people who think they’ve read Lovecraft have in fact never read anything but Derleth.”

  “So the Derlethians …”

  “Breakaway branch of the church that read Derleth as well as Lovecraft, which was anathema to the purists. Derleth was a traditional Christian, after all, parochial school lad, he superimposed Christian morality on the tales. On top of that, the Derlethians argued there was no need to use all these hallucinogenic sacraments. Needless to say, the mainstream media talked them up as the safe and sane alternative.”

  “OK; that sounds familiar.”

  “Eventually some of the Derlethians got outed as police informants, at which point the whole bunch got purged, excommunicated, whatever. Windsor Annesley took pity on a bunch of them who recanted and allowed them back into the church on a case-by-case basis, but there’s still nothing much worse you can call a Cthulhian than a Disciple of Derleth the Heretic. Besides which, if you were paying attention, most of the church members and former members who turned state’s evidence and testified against Windsor at the trial were actually Branch Derlethians.”

  “And Bucky has disappeared in the company of a former Derlethian.”

  “So it would appear.”

  “Thanks, Les.”

  “Hope it helps.”

  “What on earth happened to those dust jackets?”

  “God knows. They seem to have been through some kind of titanic struggle with the Forces of Darkness.”

  “Dominus vobiscum.”

  “Et cum spiritu tuo.”

  * * *

  Marquita laughed again when Matthew took the food out of the brown paper bags that evening and spread it on her kitchen table.

  “Matthew, you guys brought enough for six people!”

  “Then you’ll just have leftovers tomorrow. We appreciate your having us over on short notice.” Marquita had opted for red wine, which Chantal shared. They’d splurged and bought a California Shiraz with an actual cork. Matthew had managed to come up with some Mexican Coca-Cola, the kind without any high-fructose corn sweetener, to go with his cheeseburger grinder.

  Marquita had a white cat, named Snowball of course, and a well-kept back yard with a couple tall trees full of leaves, a willow and a big red-leafed cherry. They sipped their drinks
and nibbled on potato chips and cooling slices of mushroom pizza till she judged the time was right.

  “Do we need to hide, or keep real quiet?”

  “No,” she laughed again, a musical laugh. “The orbs like people, they like conversation and music and parties. Except they don’t like it when people are angry, when they shout.”

  She had the strap of her little electronic Nikon camera around her neck. Aiming it at the tree-tops, which were silhouetted against the fading pink and orange sunset, she clicked the shutter. The strobe flashed, painting the tree white for an instant.

  “Just one,” she said, turning her camera so they could see the shot of the tree tops in the view screen on the back — mostly black and empty sky. “Here, I’ll zoom in.” She did. In the center of the viewing field now was a white disc, the outer edges opaque but the translucent center looking like a single-celled amoeba on a microscope slide.

  “An orb!” said Chantal.

  “With any luck, we can do better than that.”

  Ten minutes later, as the sky faded to a dark Technicolor blue and Venus appeared near the horizon, Marquita was taking a shot every twenty seconds or so.

  “Here,” she said. The change in the view screen was astonishing. There had to be a hundred orbs, in different sizes and colors. Chantal kept looking up at the sky and then back to the image on the camera’s viewer. She’d watched Marquita take these photos. All those round, amoeba-like objects in various colors were really there, obviously. But how could they be?

  Near the top of the image, a bright golden orb had started moving while the picture was taken, leaving a wavy trail moving up and to the right. It was moving differently from the others, indicating they weren’t all just drifting in the same direction on the gentle breeze, the way dust particles would — assuming anyone had ever seen a sky full of dust particles the size of soccer balls. Expertly, she zoomed in to show them the dancing track.

  “But you never see them with the naked eye?” Chantal asked.

  “Some people say after you’ve been doing this for years you can, you do start to see them. Sometimes, just as the strobe goes off, I know where they’re going to be, because I see a little white twinkle wherever an orb is. Some people say they see a red twinkle; I see white. Not always, though.”

  “How big are they?” Matthew asked. “How far away?”

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  “I mean, are they hundreds of yards up in the sky, or close to the tree tops?”

  “They’re about even with the tree tops. Sometimes if Snowball is in the tree they come down to look at her. They’ll even touch her, I think, but she doesn’t act like she can feel them.”

  “And you get the cat and the orb and the tree in the same photo?” Chantal asked.

  “Sure. You can actually see part of the cat through the orb. Only the outer rim is, like, solid. I’ve got some of those, but I’d have to hunt through my memory cards.”

  “So they’re … about the size of a basketball?”

  “Some of them. They can vary, from the size of a little marble or a tennis ball up to, I don’t know, more like a beach ball.”

  “And this one that started moving while your strobe was going off. How fast is he moving?” Matthew pointed at the image on the little screen.

  “I don’t know. Pretty fast.”

  “Well, let’s say that flash stays lit for a thousandth of a second. Some of them can last as long as a two-hundredth, some run as short as one three-thousandth, but let’s say one-thousandth, which is pretty average. How far did it move in that time — two feet?”

  “About that.”

  “So if it could maintain that speed, it could move 2,000 feet in a second, which is more than a third of a mile. At three seconds to the mile, 20 miles a minute, that thing is moving 1,200 miles an hour.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “Sure. Although you’re in speeding bullet territory. That’s a lot faster than a commercial jet, although the military probably has birds that can move that fast. But to accelerate to that speed from a standstill in a fraction of a second? That’s impressive.”

  Marquita tried another shot, but her strobe failed to fire — she’d inadvertently flipped it off. The resulting image was completely black, except for a small white object at the upper right.

  “What’s the thing up at the corner of the frame?” Chantal asked, pointing at the very different, angular shape that had glowed bright white for the camera, even without the benefit of the little strobe.

  “We don’t know,” Marquita replied, zooming in to enlarge the little object. “I call them fairies, but Bucky says they’re bugs, just bugs that come out at night.”

  The shape did appear to have rounded, attenuated wings. Other than that, it all depended on how you wanted to look at it.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The store didn’t open till 10, so Matthew called a council of war for 8 a.m. in the kitchen. The whole staff attended, Les the vampire novelist and Marian the manager, who seemed to stay with Les in the basement apartment more often than not these days, Chantal of course, and little Skeezix the book scout, barely five feet tall, with his distinctive unruly head of short, multi-colored hair, a subtle but symmetrical tabby pattern of gray, white, gold and brown, seldom combed and therefore rising up in unpredictable tufts and peaks, mostly above his ears. Since it never seemed to grow out, the consensus was that this was probably not a dye job.

  Matthew served fried cubed potatoes, fresh eggs which Skeezix dutifully hauled in from one of the local farmers’ markets each Saturday — or Wednesdays if his Saturday yard saling kept him late — fresh raspberries and apricots, toasted slices of pear bread considerately provided by Mrs. Captain Jack the next-door neighbor, orange juice, hot mint tea, and Virginia ham. Nobody went hungry when Matthew cooked.

  Les drank his tea and eyed the food dubiously. Les had been too long on thin rations to actually turn down a meal. And the truth was he actually looked better now that he was dragging himself to the gym three times a week. His waist was trimmer, his breathing was stronger, and there was a little color in his cheeks, to match Marian’s. But clearly he found the prospect of rising before noon, when the sun was in the wrong part of the sky entirely, about as appealing as electro-shock therapy.

  The girls abstained from the ham, as usual, but the full legion of fur people formed an attentive perimeter around the table, eager to help dispose of anything unwanted. In fact, though their ever-shifting formation made an accurate count difficult, there appeared to be one cat too many.

  “Who’s that?” Matthew asked as he served the ham, pointing with his chin at a long-legged gray velvet part-Abyssinian who looked like he’d walked out of a painting on the wall of some Egyptian tomb.

  “Serafina brought him,” Skeezix explained. “He’s new to the neighborhood.”

  “Skeezix?”

  “What?”

  “You’ve noticed he doesn’t have a collar?”

  “Really?”

  If he was a stray and they fed him, he’d consider himself to have found a home.

  “And he’s a he?”

  “So it would appear,” Marian added, helpfully.

  “OK. As long as he doesn’t spray.”

  “Of course not!”

  Matthew somehow found Skeezix’s assurance less than fully convincing.

  “Learn anything from Marquita?” Les asked, once he’d warmed to the task and helped put away his share of the eggs and potatoes and turned back pensively to his tea and toast.

  “It’s clear enough, up to a point.” Matthew shoved his remaining fresh eggs back into the refrigerator, though he did bark a sharp “Hey!” to warn off Mr. Cuddles, who’d grown tired of waiting for scraps and was wiggling his butt, preparing to launch himself directly onto the table. Matthew then turned an evil eye on Skeezix, who they all suspected of encouraging the cats in their bad table manners. Skeezix, of course, continued slathering Mrs. Captain Jack’s homemade raspber
ry jam on his toast, oblivious.

  “Marquita showed Worthy her photos of the orbs,” Matthew went on. “Nothing magic about it, anyone with a modern digital camera can go out at night, point the camera up to the tree tops, turn on the flash and shoot some photos. Although actually, it turns out some electronic cameras are better than others. Apparently the more expensive cameras may filter out the orbs.”

  “Why would they do that?” Chantal asked.

  “It wasn’t their goal to screen out orbs, it just happens when they apply lens coatings that are supposed to prevent color distortion.”

  “You’re kidding.” Chantal half-smiled in disbelief. “They limit what the camera can see?”

  “Sure. It’s the old ‘stand with your back to the sun’ routine. People want a snapshot of the kids to look ‘normal,’ they don’t want any lens flare or UFOs showing up. Anyway, except for pricier cameras that are essentially filtered to block the orbs, eventually you’ll get pictures like the ones we saw last night — orbs.”

  “So they’re real?” Les frowned, obviously still enduring a bout of morning grumps. “They’re not some flaw in the camera?”

  “Jesus, Les. You, of all people. History will condemn every single person who claims to be a professional physicist in this century. You show them photos of what appear to be living organisms the size of softballs or even basketballs, with interior structures that look like giant bacteria or amoebas — various colors, yellow, gold, pearl blue, iridescent green, floating around in the air, sometimes partially hidden among the leaves of a tree, obviously capable of being attracted by simple curiosity, capable of acceleration, willful propulsion, moving around at various speeds without regard to wind direction, and how do they respond? Do they immediately start cooking up experiments to film these things in 3-D, figure out their means of propulsion and how fast they move, figure out if they have weight and mass, why they reflect light or fluoresce or whatever they’re doing within the spectrum of the electronic cameras but not within the wavelength range of the human eye?